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The Art and Science of Photography

Milk Drop CoronetQuite a few years ago, during my undergraduate studies, I took a course named “Science in Art”. The course explored various scientific subjects such as light and symmetry as reflected in famous paintings, sculptures and other artistic creations.

For my final course paper I decided to explore both artistic and scientific aspects of photography. I did quite a bit of research for the paper and learned a lot in the process. Anyway, the paper was lying on my hard disk for years and I thought this might be a good time to share it.

The paper is called “Photography – a new art or yet another scientific achievement“. Here’s an overview of the main topics:

  • Part I – History of Photography: Camera Obscura, Reflex Mirror, Optical Glass and Lenses
  • Part II – Technology of Photography: Light Sensitive Materials, Daguerreotypes, Roll Film, Color, Digital Photography
  • Part III – Photography as Art: Pictorialism and Impressionism, Naturalism, Straight Photography, New Vision of the 20th Century
  • Part IV – Photographic Techniques: Stereoscopic Photography, Infrared Photography, Panoramic Photography, Astrophotography, Pinhole Photography

I posted the paper online as browseable HTML and PDF.

Also, I posted it to Scribd – “YouTube for Documents”:

[View full screen]

The title image for the paper and this post is “Milk Drop Coronet” by Harold Edgerton – an electrical engineer who began to take photographs as scientific experiments. That’s science and art for you! :)

Enjoy!

One Response to “The Art and Science of Photography”

  1. Tim Says:

    Sorry i posted this to the wrong page.